Today we are going to take a quick look at the Kingston Fury Renegade Pro DDR5-6000 ECC RIDIMMs. We have these as part of an upcoming review/ video, but we wanted to pull them out and discuss them separately. Many of our readers may not realize this, but the fastest DDR5 ECC memory subsystem you can get on a Xeon CPU does not belong to the 4th Generation Intel Xeon “Sapphire Rapids” processors (we are excluding HBM2e Xeon Max here.) Instead, it belongs to the workstation Xeon W-3400 line that can clock its memory controllers much higher than DDR4-4800 stock speeds.
Kingston Fury Renegade Pro 16GB DDR5-6000 ECC RDIMM Overview
The Kingston Fury Renegade Pro kit that we had access to is a 16GB DDR5-6000 kit. Kingston has some different capacities and speeds available, but this is one of the higher speed versions for now.
One of the big differences between this, and most DDR5-6000 kits on the market is that this is an ECC RDIMM kit. Something that is different in the DDR5 generation from the DDR4 and DDR3 generations is that the consumer UDIMMs will not even fit in the ECC RDIMM slots. We covered this in Why DDR5 is Absolutely Necessary in Modern Servers.
Kingston makes this eight module kit (8x 16GB = 128GB) for motherboards like the ASUS Pro WS W790E SAGE SE where it is a validated solution.
Here are the key timing specs for the kit that we had:
Here is a quick screenshot of the DIMMs at DDR5-6000 speeds.
These may not have crazy RGB, but they are fast ECC RDIMMs.
Final Words
You may have recently seen these memory modules in our Falcon Northwest “Build 3” in our recent Building 3x Intel Xeon W-3400 Workstation and Servers with the ASUS Pro WS W790E SAGE SE piece. Having these memory modules allows for roughly 25% more memory bandwidth than standard DDR5-4800 RDIMMs.
One of the big challenges with this kit is that we would normally want more than ~2.3GB of RAM per core with 128GB and a 56-core Xeon W, especially since we often now target 8GB/ core. Kingston has some 32GB kits, but not 64GB modules in these overclockable kits. Hopefully that is coming soon.
This kit is almost asus exclusive. As far as I know, only ASUS and Asrock are making DDR5 RDIMM motherboards that supports XMP. W790 from Gigabyte and Supermico even Asrock Rack only supports JEDEC speeds. I’m quite surprised that Kingston is making a module for such a niche market.
The statement “Having these memory modules allows for roughly 25% more memory bandwidth than standard DDR5-4800 RDIMMs” appears in both this and the linked workstation build article without. I could not find any benchmarks against other ECC RDIMMs to verify the claim. For example, the results for the Falcon Northwest are around 10 percent faster than the Intel reference system while water cooling and other factors are in play besides the RAM.
Anyone who doesn’t have the hardware can divide 6000/4800 to get 1.25 and infer 25 percent more. As memory bandwidth–not to mention application performance–depends on many factors other than clock speed, it would be nice to run John McCalpin’s stream benchmark with suitably large buffer sizes to very the bandwidth claims. The usual application tests comparing the 6000 to 4800 DIMMs while holding the other hardware the same would also be interesting.